More Live@edu adopters in schools and universities

For those of you who missed it, here's the dozen word summary of Live@edu: Free student email, hosted by Microsoft's Exchange 2010 cloud, with a 10GB mailbox

The case studies for the Live@edu email service keep coming - this time, it's the Delaware Department of Education and United Arab Emirates University…

Delaware Department of Education using Live@edu

They are migrating 20,000 faculty and staff as well as 129,000 students. Their case study has just been published, and there's a couple of quotes that stuck out for me. Jim Sills, Delaware chief information officer and secretary of DTI said:

Beyond just email, the services provided through Microsoft Live@edu will allow the state to reduce overall support costs and eventually provide a seamless interface with the existing Microsoft platform to access tools such as Microsoft Office and Excel

And Ron Usilton, the Lake Forest School District Information Systems manager was quoted as saying:

Resources, such as interactive whiteboards and mobile computer labs, along with online learning programs, provide our students and educators the tools for a 21st-century education, but a method to provide better staff and student collaboration still was needed.

The United Arab Emirates University (UAEU) has just chosen a mix deployment - with the existing 13,000 current staff and students moving to an onsite Exchange mail system, whilst 55,000 alumni students get access to the Live@edu Cloud email system. The driver for the change was that their existing mail system was reaching the end of it's life:

The system’s calendaring capabilities were limited and did not include sharing. Interfaces were not intuitive and frustrated both users and administrators. Storage limits forced the IT department to restrict users to relatively small mailboxes, and performance was slow. In addition, management was costly and complex, and it was difficult to defend the system against unsolicited bulk email messages.

Not only did the new implementation improve the service deliver, the UAEU have calculated - from implementation costs, staff, facilities, equipment and power use - a saving of over $270,000.